Psychology Today | 25.11.2025 04:35
For most of Western history, the soul was the master key to human nature, the invisible essence that thinkers from Plato to Descartes believed set us apart from animals, grounded morality, and housed the mind itself. Psychology, in its earliest form, was literally the “study of the soul.” Mental illness was treated as a disturbance of this fragile inner essence. Even as modern science began to peel the mind away from metaphysics, the soul proved stubborn, clinging to public imagination long after psychology turned decisively toward neurons, behavior, and cognition.
